This year from January to June we are thrilled to provide The SmokeLong Emerging Writer Fellowship to five talented writers. Each of these writers will receive feedback from three senior SmokeLong editors twice a month, free participation in SmokeLong Fitness, the year-round community workshop of SmokeLong, and a look behind the scenes of SmokeLong, reading the submissions queue alongside the SmokeLong submissions editors for six months.
Recent fellowship alumni have or will soon be celebrating the publication of their first collections. We look forward to sharing this news on social media soon! But for now, help us celebrate our 2026 cohort!
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Uduak-Abasi Ekong is a Manchester-based Nigerian writer whose short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Afreada magazine, Wensum Literary, Everscribe Magazine, Ojuju Magazine, Ekondo Review, and more. She’s the winner of the 2025 Blue Pencil Agency Pitch Prize and the 2025 Book Edit New Writers’ Prize. Her fiction has been shortlisted/longlisted for the Bath Novel Awards, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Penguin Micheal Joseph Undiscovered Writers’ Prize, Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, Creative Future Writers’ Award, Mslexia Short Story Prize, Disquiet Literary Fiction Contest, and more.
She is an alumna of the Faber Academy ‘Getting Started: Beginner’s Fiction’ course.
Claire Y. Guo is a fiction writer and poet based in San Jose, California. She is an alumna of the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, published or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, The Adroit Journal, Trampset, Fractured Lit, The New York Times, The National Poetry Quarterly, and is the Grand Winner of the SmokeLong Grand Micro Prize 2025. When she’s not writing, she loves to collect fountain pens and funny words (like kerfuffle).
Alex Juffer lives in a small town in Minnesota with his wife, son, two dogs, and a family of attic squirrels. His house was built in 1883, so he’s recently gotten into mortar work and crawlspace encapsulation out of necessity. He’s won competitions, been a Wigleaf Top 50, and has publications in Epoch, Passages North, Monkey Bicycle, Vestal Review, X-R-A-Y, The Los Angeles Review and more. When he’s not writing, he teaches flash fiction courses at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Monarch and Best Microfiction, and shortlisted for a number of prizes, including Bridport, Bath and Oxford. She’s the one rooting for the underdog and this planet, despite the chaos around us. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children.
Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. He is a Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominee. His stories appear or are forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, Iron Horse, Prime Number, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.
